Does hype float the bulk of America's greatest restaurants? The Wall Street Journal thinks so. In an article last week cataloging the nation's most overrated restaurants (the legendary Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, is called "a dinner party thrown by aging hippies with a really great vegetable garden") writer Raymond Sokolov (The Cook's Canon) tosses a cow pie at The Mansion on Turtle Creek, which he describes as a "painful and pricey attempt to make a dowager hip again." Case in point: Southern chicken-fried lobster on bourbon sweet corn and barbecue broiled Yukon mashed potatoes with country braised green beans ($55), from which Sokolov says he suffered mental indigestion (chef Dean Fearing couldn't be reached for comment). But in the same gentle screed, Sokolov lauds Cowtown's Café Modern in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth as one of the most underrated restaurants in the nation, implying museum pieces may have been switched...City Café owner Paula Bruton (Lombardi Mare) says Karim Alaoui, her partner in the City Café acquisition from founder Mardi Schma, is no longer with the restaurant. Alaoui, one-time general manager of Lombardi Mare and Mediterraneo among others, departed a month ago, the same time Bruton pulled in Rick Naon as executive chef. Naon, chef at the recently shuttered Morton's of Chicago in Addison, will attempt to lure back the restaurant's core audience by returning to its meat loaf and chicken pot pie roots. "We're pretty much going back to basics, how Mardi ran it before," Bruton admits.
